Monday, August 30, 2010

Did some say "conspiracy theories"?

Of course, the idea that an Iranian spy with a conviction for bank fraud managed not only to convince liberal journalists that he was the authentic voice of democracy, but to convince the CIA that he headed a credible nationalist movement would be ludicrous enough. The idea that, having been exposed as such, he could nevertheless remain powerful enough to gain the post which allowed him to disqualify his political opponents from standing in elections, still more so. The idea that someone who the Decent Left first lionised, then defended, then finally more or less refused to talk about, could be the kingmaker in the Iraqi elections, seven years later, is pretty far fetched.

So I guess Ahmad Chalabi must just be a very popular politician after all.

49 Comments:

Unrelated to this post, but can anyone tell me if the 'why are you talking about Palestine all the time, why aren't you putting an equal about of energy into Sudan/Burma/[insert human rights violator], is it because you are an anti-semite?' crowd also berate those who spend all their energies talking about, say Sudan or Burma, on the grounds that they never mention Operation Cast Lead, the occupation of Palestine, etc.?

Okay, we've had Chalabi, Hassan Butt... Can I suggest another tricksy character to add to the growing list of people who have received glowing praise and endorsement from Nick C., only to later turn out to be a bullshitter and/or a lunatic?

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2310/full

To be fair, after lots of reading, I'm still unsure whether DP's case for unfair treatment was justified or not. That said, I've seen the guy commenting at various sites recently and he makes Melanie Phillips look sober, calm and restrained.

Of course, if we were to expand the list to "non-British conmen in smart suits who have suckered large numbers of Decents this decade", it'd be a long and arduous task.

Can I start? I'll take France, and others can tour the atlas - Bernard Henri Levy, Pascal Bruckner and Bernard Kouchner, FTW.

FounderofMSFKouchner is in the news this week because he considered resigning over Sarkozy's jihad on the Roma, which is jolly brave of him. I notice he hasn't gone yet, but it's surely just a matter of time.

Ignoring this tedious Blair stuff, a very good essay by Pankaj Mishra on 'Islamismism':

http://tinyurl.com/35halo8

sample:

Whitechapel has much in its past—oppression, bigotry, poverty, radicalism—that would have helped Hirsi Ali understand not only the neighborhood’s newest inhabitants but also her own family. But “Nomad” reveals that her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam—fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism—are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity. Many more young women are killed in India for failing to bring sufficient dowry than perish in “honor killings” across the Muslim world. Such social pathologies no more reveal the barbaric core of Hinduism or Islam than domestic violence in Europe and America defines the moral essence of Christianity or the Enlightenment.

That was a good essay by Pankaj and thanks for the other link George. I wonder if Pankaj reads AW - he certainly sees the tendency towards self-pity so prevelent in much Decent writing, particularly the idea that they are an ignored minority who have trouble getting their ideas into the media.

Nobody has posted anything about it here but people must have noticed how many of the Decent tendency have been lining up to fellate Tony over the last 24 hours.

He really is a living god to these people. All the faults - the messianism, the complete lack of political judgement, the lying, the contempt for Labours' base and the sucking up to the rich, the disasterous economic model pursued by New Labour. All airbrushed out. Astonishing stuff.

Of late – as evidenced by warnings from Blair, Mandelson and those voices who share their view of things – this has resulted in one of the more depressing aspects of the Labour leadership contest: claims that "Red" Ed Miliband is a dangerous old Labour throwback. No matter that his handful of policy proposals – for the tentative roll-out of a living wage, or a graduate tax, or the high pay commission also supported by his brother – are modest and somewhat cautious. In the wake of an editorial claiming that even his brother was in danger of drifting too far to the left, one Times columnist – the venerable David Aaronovitch – compared him to Michael Foot.

No western government wants to persecute Muslims. There are private citizens in the west, extremists on their own account, who would like to persecute Muslims, but they do not have their hands on the levers of power.

with the name 'Geert Wilders', or indeed, if we treat Israel as Western, with the name 'Avigdor Lieberman'.

As for the ending, it's actually offensive. Nothing Mishra has ever written indicates that he would take the Ramadan line on stoning (also, weirdly, James's account of Ramadan's exchange with Sarkozy differs from others). James's leading question betrays his own lack of attention to Mishra's piece, and simplistically attempts to re-establish the 'with us or against us' approach that's worked SO well in recent years.

It's weird, and for my money far more demeaning that Buruma/Garton Ash pointing out, accurately, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali's supporters make a big deal of her good looks.

Also, on that topic:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is perfectly understandable when she takes a root-and-branch attitude. After all, a root-and-branch attitude was taken to her: she was a female, so she suffered.

This, in addition to being very hard to follow, manages to completely undermine everything people who like AHA have claimed about her, and it vindicates the Buruma/Garton Ash/Mishra line.

Also am i the only one who doesn't understand the following sentence?

if silence means that those who say nothing about atrocities generated within the Islamic culture are worried that they will help anti-Islamic forces in the west then they are mistaking their real enemy.

i think this is leading on to his contentious point that the majority of those wishing to persecute Muslims are Muslim themselves. But I can't quite work it out.

It isn't aided by this:

We are prepared to accept that silence does not mean indifference or tacit approval.

coming straight after "what Islam most needs to do [...] is to find ways for its vast majority [...] to express their condemnation of a murderous minority".

I still don't get it. So he wants Muslims to protest some unspecified things in Islam, which he's not very clear on - it sometimes feels like just al-Qaeda, at others it's the entire treatment of women in Islam per se; BUT, if they don't protest, that's ok too, only it's not.

I do love the way he styles himself as someone with excellent writing in the letter, as the letter itself does not make any sense at all.

Speaking as a sub-editor, the natural rewrite of the extract would be as follows.

if silence means that those who say nothing about atrocities generated within the Islamic culture are worried that they will help anti-Islamic forces in the west then they are mistaking their real enemy.

is clearer when recast thus:

If the silence of those who say nothing about atrocities generated within the Islamic culture is explained by their worrying they will help anti-Islamic forces in the west then they are mistaking their real enemy.

ie "means", which is ambiguous as to causal direction in chatty speech, translates as the (less ambiguous) "is explained by"...

I haven't bothered reading the piece -- Clive James has been an idiot for my entire adult life -- so I have no idea if this meaning fits in with the rest or makes it less coherent.

In the interests of providing context, Aaronovitch's comments re E. Miliband (it's probably necessary to quote it at this length) sum to:

"It is quite likely that by 2015 there will be an improved economic performance, and - other things being very unequal - a good 40 per cent plus of voters willing to back the Conservative part of the deal.

David Miliband gets that. Ed Miliband, the final Venus, doesn't seem to. One may summarise his approach as returning to Gordon Brown's famous and disloyal conference challenge to Tony Blair - "best when we are Labour" - in which Labour magicks answers to 21st-century problems out of aboriginal instincts.

Let me take one example to stand for many. In an interview last week MiliE said the following: "Actually, if we'd listened to our party more on a range of issues - housing, agency workers, tuition fees - we'd have been a better government, not a worse government."

As far as I can tell, "listening" on tuition fees would have meant not bringing them in. Readers may recall that the contention back then (fed, secretly, by Mr Brown's lieutenants) was that applications to university would fall with top-up fees. Exactly the opposite happened. Which disconcerted the Tories, who also opposed tuition fees (should Labour have listened to them?) but not the Lib Dems who, in opposition, were always undisconcertable.

MiliE's blueprint for good government, then, would have required either ignoring the crisis in higher education funding caused by expansion, cutting student numbers or bringing in an unstated alternative form of funding. He may recall that when asked to provide numbers for such an alternative - the graduate tax - Mr Brown declined. Top-up tuition fees, then, were a classic example of a government taking the right, if unpopular, step; ie, an example of what leadership is all about.

Nor is it encouraging to see MiliE waving Iraq around as if it will make a difference to voters in 2015. His silent opposition to the invasion is not the problem, but his belief that it can now be parlayed into a leadership vote is.

Unless he is promising not to invade Iraq again, it can only mean that whatever the next crisis consists of, he will be more reluctant than his brother to take action. But the next crisis could just as easily be another Kosovo.

There is also a big problem with the strategic decision to concentrate fire on the Liberal Democrats and the frankly juvenile pledge not to cut any deal with them as long as Nick Clegg is their leader. This may score with Labour activists, but it looks like the crassest tribalism to the ordinary voter. And Liberal Democrat losses don't necessarily mean a Labour win. Far more likely is that they will translate to a Tory majority.

So in terms of Labour's default mentality, Ed Miliband is Michael Foot circa 1981. He is the way in which you think you can have your ideological cake and persuade the electorate to eat it. And you just can't."

"He is the way in which you think you can have your ideological cake and persuade the electorate to eat it. And you just can't."

You've just spent a blog comment arguing that you can - that you can bring in unpopular policies that are 'right' - tuition fees and a murderous, piratical war on Iraq are your examples.

If we were take the line that as the Tories command 40% of the vote (for argument's sake), which in the British electoral system is enough to win an overwhelming majority, every other party should quit arguing for policies that they think are 'right' and simply argue for better presented versions of Tory policies, then we'd be arguing for an end to democracy. A no-party system. As Tony Blair has killed hundreds of thousands in the pursuit of democracy, supposedly, I hope you never cross paths with him!

Word verification: schim - the ideological dispute between Blairites and the Cameroons.

Not only that, he frequently congratulates himself on being a top writer, pedantically censures other writers for their poor English, and writes long and dull essays on the paramount importance of clear expression.

No 'conspiracy theory'-related conversation would be complete without mention of The Paranoid Style.

1. Any guesses as to the leader-writer in question?

2. They're not even trying to connect the headline with the content

3. Rentoul is using the (in his case no doubt otiose) fair use protection previously recommended by me as the future of Aaronovigilance. Also implemented (under title 'piss and wind'), though much more safely given the fisking format and the high comment-to-quote ratio.

I see His Eponymousness was on Newsnight last night, generally talking what seemed like sense on Catholicism, though his thought that it was forbidden to criticise Muslims in the media seemed not to have stopped many, any his claim that if there is a God he wouldn't have allowed Werder Bremen to come back from two goals down misplaces the locus of infallibility in North London.

Well, it's true that you can't criticise Muslims in the media without someone complaining.

At least, you can't criticise Muslims in the media in ways that border on racism without someone complaining.

To be more precise, you can't criticise Muslims in the media in ways that border on racism indefinitely without someone complaining eventually.

Or perhaps what Aaro really means is that you can't criticise Muslims in the media in ways that border on racism indefinitely without getting the sneaking suspicion that there's a high likelihood of someone complaining eventually, which takes all the fun out of it. Which I think is (a) true and (b) genuinely resented by some people, although I didn't think Aaro was among them.

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Once you get through all the typical Cohen bluster (which accounts for about 75% of the piece), it's actually surprisingly balanced:

Will his eloquence justify the conduct of the Iraq war? It cannot for two reasons. Even as someone who went from loathing to respecting Blair because of Iraq – a rare political journey, I grant you – I cannot accept his dismissal of the chaos that enveloped Iraq after the invasion. As he says, it was brought by al-Qa’ida and Iranian-backed militias who were desperate for liberation to fail. But his explanation for the failure of the US, Britain, Australia and their allies to foresee the danger is too brusque. He says in effect, “If someone had warned us, we would have acted differently.”

His tone is the same when he briefly mentions the banking crisis. “Had regulators said that a crisis is about to break … we would have acted. But they didn’t say that.”

It is not good enough. Elected leaders, not regulators or generals, govern democracies because the best of them sense crises before they break. In his foreign policy and in his economic policy Blair did not stop to think about unforeseen events preventing Iraq’s transition to democracy or blowing a hole in his booming bubble economy. He did not prepare for the worst. Indeed, he could not bring himself to imagine the worst.

the 'second reason' is where Nick just can't help himself - it's that apprently people will never be convinced because they think the west is the 'root cause' of all the world's suffering blah blah islamofascism-loving liberals etc etc zzz.

on a side note, Nick's smears against Ed Miliband worked really well eh?

Ed Miliband's win is, of course, also another defeat for the forces of Decency, most of whom lined up behind Miliband D. So now the US President and the leader of the Labour Party are agreed the Iraq war was a mistake.

Ed Miliband's win is, of course, also another defeat for the forces of Decency, most of whom lined up behind Miliband D. So now the US President and the leader of the Labour Party are agreed the Iraq war was a mistake.

Julian Assange will step back onto the public stage this week with an appearance in London.

Wikileaks' spokesman and de facto leader is scheduled to speak on Thursday at City University in London. He will debate the rights and wrongs of the whistleblowing site's release of tens of thousands of frontline intelligence reports from Afganistan with Times columnist David Aaronovich.